In-Vivo Validation of Fully Implantable Multi-Panel Devices for Remote Monitoring of Metabolism

Towards wearable and implantable continuous drug monitoring: A review

Continuous drug monitoring is a promising alternative to current therapeutic drug monitoring strategies and has a strong potential to reshape our understanding of pharmacokinetic variability and to improve individualised therapy. This review highlights recent advances in biosensing technologies that support continuous drug monitoring in real time. We focus primarily on aptamer-based biosensors, wearable and implantable devices. Emphasis is given to the approaches employed in constructing biosensors. We pay attention to sensors' biocompatibility, calibration performance, long-term characteristics stability and measurement quality. Last, we discuss the current challenges and issues to be addressed in continuous drug monitoring to make it a promising, future tool for individualised therapy. The ongoing efforts are expected to result in fully integrated implantable drug biosensing technology. Thus, we may anticipate an era of advanced healthcare in which wearable and implantable biochips will automatically adjust drug dosing in response to patient health conditions, thus enabling the management of diseases and enhancing individualised therapy.

Printed nanofilms mechanically conforming to living bodies

It is anticipated that flexible wearable/implantable devices for biomedical applications will be established for the development of medical diagnostics and therapeutics. However, these devices need to be compatible with the physical and mechanical properties of the living body. In this minireview, we introduce free-standing polymer ultra-thin films (referred to as "polymer nanosheets"), for which a variety of polymers can be selected as building blocks (e.g., biodegradable polymers, conductive polymers, and elastomers), as a platform for flexible biomedical devices that are mechanically compatible with the living body, and then we demonstrate the use of "printed nanofilms" by combining nanosheets and printing technologies with a variety of inks represented by drugs, conductive nanomaterials, chemical dyes, bio-mimetic polymers, and cells. Owing to the low flexural rigidity (<10-2 nN m) of the polymer nanosheets, which is within the range of living brain slices (per unit width), the flexible printed nanofilms realize bio-integrated structure and display various functions with unique inks that continually monitor or detect biological activities, such as performing surface electromyography, measuring epidermal strain, imaging tissue temperature, organizing cells, and treating lesions in wounds and tumors.